A chip and a chair

This is the second time I've used this title; the first was on October 27, 2011. I included a reference in that post, and I'll do the same here:

An old poker adage says that all you need to win is a chip and a chair, especially since Jack “Treetop” Straus pulled off this feat in the '82 championship.

James McManus, "Positively Fifth Street"

On Friday night, I came very close to pulling off this feat myself. When I got slaughtered very early on in my nightly MTT 8-game, I decided to enter a sit and go 8-game instead of waiting around two hours for the next MTT. Playing aggressively, I was able to get to heads up with a nice chip advantage. Things started to go south from there, however, and I got severely short stacked. On hand 161, I had just 350 of the 9,000 chips in play, which is a mere 3.89%. At this point, the small blind was $250 and the big blind was $500. So I had barely more than one small blind, which is close enough to the proverbial chip for government work. Improbably, I ended up winning. I was sure this was the best comeback of my sit and go career, but actually it only makes it to #7, judging by percentage of chips in play at the nadir (of course, the percentage of chips in play at the zenith is always 100). Here are the top 10:

 0.0133 (        40       3000) 2014/0306/d hand4
 0.0317 (       190       6000) 2012/1011/b hand52
 0.0342 (       205       6000) 2012/0824/f hand16
 0.0347 (       104       3000) 2014/0314/d hand13
 0.0380 (       114       3000) 2014/0313/g hand19
 0.0383 (       230       6000) 2012/0824/e hand41
 0.0389 (       350       9000) 2015/0109/b hand161
 0.0450 (       270       6000) 2012/0830/d hand27
 0.0475 (       285       6000) 2012/0818/i hand17
 0.0483 (       290       6000) 2012/1031/b hand24

Note that I came back to win in all these dire scenarios.

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

  4500       500           6        21    54        0
   900       100           6       182     1     3510

delta: $-2,490
balance: $9,604,830